How long after requeening do extremely aggressive behaviors go away?

1938 Views 3 Replies 4 Participants Last post by Hilltop, Jun 2, 2014

imthedude

Discussion Starter · Jun 2, 2014

I re-queened an overly aggressive hive last weekend, May 24th. This morning I needed to add a 2nd deep and bumped the landing board ever so slightly before getting startedd. This caused bees to boil out of the entrance and immediately start headbutting me (good thing I went back and got my veil), stinging my gloves, etc., all without even manipulating the hive in the least. Needless to say, I'm ready for these "old" bees to go and the new, hopefully nicer ones to come along.

I know it takes at least 3 weeks for bees from the new queen to emerge, but how long does it take for all of the old bees to die off or go away? Is the 6 week life a good rule of thumb?

TIA

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mathesonequip

· #2 · Jun 2, 2014

yes

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jmgi

· #3 · Jun 2, 2014

In the summer I would say 6 weeks also. I requeened a vicious hive about a month ago, and it didn't take long at all for the bees to calm down, actually they were much better to work in about a week after requeening. Even though none of the new queens offspring were hatched out, just getting rid of the old mean queen and introducing a new queen caused the bees to become much gentler, I don't know how something like that can happen, but it did.

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Hilltop

· #4 · Jun 2, 2014

I requeened a really hot hive last year and it seemed like 6 weeks later I still had quite a few hot bees flying around and bothering me. If you have new eggs the day you kill the old queen, and those eggs take 21 days to emerge and a bee can live up to be 6 weeks old after emerging, then it might be more like 9 weeks until they are all gone.

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